It is a story that begins in the 1980s in a practically abandoned Auckland council-owned building.
A young Nigel Brown was living in his painting studio.
“I was a bit down on my luck,’’ Brown says as he settles into his chair in his studio in Dunedin’s harbour-side industrial district.
Winter sun floods in the large floor-to-ceiling first floor windows, artworks are stacked around the walls, an inspiration wall is filled with newspaper clippings and sketches, and tables are piled high with books and discarded paint tubes.
He reminisces about his old Auckland studio, a messy, dusty, broken down place he ended up living in after becoming a full-time painter in 1978 on the back of the success of his sell-out show of Lemon Tree paintings. It is from this period his latest survey show, “Nigel Brown Broadly Speaking 1982-2025” begins, as Brown says, “on a grim note, I suppose, with a man’s head on a plate with a woman holding it”.
The work Judith and Holfoferns (1982) is a take on the Old Testament heroine that appealed to feminists of the 1980s. Another of his early works included is Clairmont Painting (1984) featuring his friend, neo-expressionist artist Philip Clairmont (1949-84).
But what he really dug into at that time was the anti-nuclear movement. Brown was one of the founding members of Visual Artists Against the Nuclear Age. His works culminated in his one and only exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the 1985 exhibition “Living in the Bomb Age”.
“It was a bit controversial, it had male nudity in it. They were big paintings. They were exploring all sorts of ideas to do with the nuclear thing; it was a pretty passionate movement in New Zealand at the time.’’
Brown, who graduated from Elam School of Art at the University of Auckland in 1971, has continued to tackle major issues of the times using his work to commentate on topics as wide as the 1981 Springbok tour, climate change, conservation, human rights, peace and poverty.
“I’m certainly looking for new ways to speak, sometimes about past things and bring them up again. So you might find in here a painting that appears to be about the Pink and White Terraces but it’s quite a complicated painting when you read it.’’
Author and poet Fiona Farrell, someone Brown has long admired, writes about his work as “not hanging quietly”, in an essay on his latest exhibition.
“They argue and interrupt, they tease and puzzle, they open onto the landscape of these islands with passionate commitment.’’
“So, I’ve used the vernacular at different times. Because there’s a lot of people that are culturally deprived out there. And one thing that drives me on is that unique objects are what I’ve got to give to people. So I’m trying to give people the comfort of the hand done.”
In an essay on Brown’s work for the exhibition, Dr David Craig says Brown has marshalled a large range of “iconic and symbolic’’ elements in his paintings since the 1970s.
“Rendered via a rough, direct handling of paint, in a flattened perspective, almost woodblock-cartoon manner, with multilayered framings, often including prophetic declarations or critical questions in texts.
“Thus Brown has staged and dramatised significant elements and issues in his own literally iconic framings.’’
Brown’s style of painting and his use of words came in for some criticism in his early years as a painter, but Brown believes his father becoming a poet and his history with the South Island, in particular Lowburn Station where he was brought up, influenced his use of text.
His father and grandfather were born on Kyeburn Diggings and mined for gold. His father trained as a bomber pilot and returned to Central Otago after the war with Brown’s mother, who was from Whanganui. They tried to settle in the South but the climate did not suit his mother’s disabilities so they moved north to finally settle on an orchard in Tauranga.
“My father wrote about all of this. He was quite critical of the closed-off world he’d come from. And he was quite depressed when the Clyde Dam happened.’’
His use of Baxter in his paintings has been questioned in more recent times after a letter by Baxter admitting raping his wife was published.
“It absolutely turns you off. But you have to look a little bit longer at what I do because I always use Baxter as a symbol. I’ve used him often as a symbol of the poet, just a question in a person.’’
His early life and work also led to the creation of one of Brown’s many trademarks, a male figure in a black singlet, a motif that started in the Lemon Tree paintings.
“The reason I related to the black singlet as a person was that I was brought up on orchards, so there was a lot of manual labour going on and in the 1970s I worked in factories, a sawmill out in Riverhead Auckland.’’
Climate change is another strong focus of his work, something which began with being awarded the inaugural Artists to Antarctica Award in 1998. It was on the ice where Brown first heard the term used by glaciologists.
Those ideas came to the forefront again when Brown and his partner Sue moved to Cosy Nook in Southland after discovering land was much cheaper than their intended destination in Northland.
“We like to go down back roads and find places.’’
It was in Southland he witnessed the sea erode the land. “Erosion is natural on a certain level, but when it becomes out of control, you feel threatened, or most people do feel threatened.’’
For a few years, the couple commuted between Auckland and Southland before finally committing to Southland and buying the land.
“The only thing that had cushioned me for the bottom of the South Island was that I’d been to Antarctica. I remember standing on Gemstone Beach and going, you ain’t going to be able to live here.’’
Shifting south was “quite a performance for an artist with lots of paintings’’ but the bonus was the scenery and essentially having their own beach.
“You might think it was completely remote down there but lots of people did come and visit. We were a bit of an oddity to the locals.’’
It also gave him the opportunity to build a large studio and the couple indulged in their love of second-hand shops, even creating a Crown Lynn room in their home. They also had a small herd of Highland cattle to keep the grass down on the property.
Brown completed the Hump Ridge Track for his 60th birthday, intrigued that locals had built the thousands of steps to create the walk.
“They were quite modest about it. That nearly killed me, it’s a gut buster.’’
During his time in the South, he took advantage of artist trips to Stewart Island and Dusky Sound which continued to feed his use of Captain Cook imagery.
“The Cook thing has been a particularly rich thing for me because you’re actually working through, as time progresses, New Zealanders’ attitudes to history which has changed a bit. People used to absent-mindedly say Cook was the beginning of settlement in New Zealand, which you wouldn’t say now. There is a mushrooming of awareness that we are an extension of Pacifica.’’
Brown, who was named an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to painting and print making in 2004, has been wondering recently why he has been fixated on Cook.
“It’s to do with the two ideas of life that some of us like, order and uniform. And society encourages these perfect myths about people. And my father was in a uniform. And the first thing when he got off the plane after having been overseas, done all his training and he got into Central Otago, his father looked at him and said get those bloody blinkers off. Because he’d been wearing sunglasses.’’
For the past 10 years the couple have lived in Dunedin with Brown using it as a base for his artist trips away. Dunedin does not feature often in his works as he believes plenty of other artists have that territory covered including his old teacher Colin McCahon, Robin White and Ralph Hotere, to name a few.
“I’ll do a side trip to somewhere like Haast again and get ideas. I’m at that stage in my life where I’m going over material and reworking it in a different way.’’
Mixing aspects of New Zealand’s landscapes with different issues and times creates invented landscapes, he says.
He often goes to places on a “painting holiday”, such as Kaka Point or Tolaga Bay, where he visits tourist sites, using them as a starting point for a series of works.
“People go, ‘you must depend on these places for subject matter’, but often I introduce other things to them.’’
In one Kaka Point work he put historic con-artist Amy Bock (1859-1947) in it as he had seen her mentioned in a tourist brochure at the hotel.
Seeing works from more than 40 years brought together for the exhibition at Milford Galleries has illuminated the links between them that he has not seen before.
“It’s quite unusual for me because I’ve been having all these shows year after year. I started in the early ’70s. And they all go out. Until you see them all together, you realise that there are links between them all. And there’s common things that you keep.”
Brown likes variety in artwork but realises that no matter how hard he tries, he cannot overcome his natural tendencies.
He acknowledges using words on painting is something a lot of people do not like.
“They say get rid of them. And I understand that. Because there are not many painters who can combine words on painting without them being a distraction.’’
Works in the exhibition include some of his favourites such as They Are Us (2019) about the Christchurch Massacre. He admits his use of a dog, one of his recurring emblems, in the painting does not translate for many Muslims who view dogs as unclean.
“When you overlap things with other cultures there may be times when you tread on toes because you are giving your individual view.’’
Triptych Listening to Ruru (2023) is another “complicated’’ work on display. It was inspired by a visit to conservationist Richard Henry’s bird enclosure on Resolution Island in Dusky Sound. Henry intrigued him as his father had been a deer culler in the area.
“So he’s a conservation symbol in my work in a general way and the ruru can be a question of everything.’’
The work also features LGBTQ+ symbols reflecting his own support for the community of which his stepson Josh Thompson is part of.
The larger works are more satisfying to complete, he says.
“But I’ve been surprised sometimes by pulling out the little works. And when you see them in the catalogue, you realise they may be small, but they can be punchy as well. So that’s been heartening for me, to see how small is not less in my work.”
